Report

State-by-state mandates have helped drive the deployment of renewable energy — namely solar and wind power. All of this deployment requires energy storage, and so the grid battery storage market is primed for growth.

A Midwest startup wins a big business plan competition by showing the promise of its technology to create a longer-lasting lithium ion battery that also can charge at a faster rate than what batteries in smart phones can deliver today.

The auction of U.S. battery maker A123, expected to kick off today, will determine if the tech will stay in the U.S. with Jonhson Controls or be snapped up by Chinese conglomerate Wanxiang. The controversy exposes fears over China and the politicization of electric vehicles.

The demand for lithium-ion batteries hasn’t grown as quickly as many battery developers have anticipated, and that leaves a rather bleak near-term outlook for startups who had counted on the rise of electric car, grid storage and even laptops as lucrative markets.

A Japanese consortium of government groups and tech companies teams up with a New Mexico utility and a federal lab for a smart grid demonstration project to figure out how to integrate solar electricity and energy storage into an electric grid.

Can the startup accelerator model work for battery companies? The folks behind CalCharge, the brainchild of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF) that hopes to attract some 30 battery companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, think so.

A123 Systems was supposed to be a success story about an innovative U.S. battery company, but it has struggled to live up to that expectation. The company on Tuesday posted lower revenues and greater losses for the first quarter of this year, about two months after it launched a program to replace defective batteries.

Lithium ion battery maker A123 Systems announced that it will replace some of the battery modules and packs that it’s sold that could contain defective prismatic cells, and that includes batteries for Fisker’s electric car the Karma.

Today wireless charging for cell phones is pretty kludgy. But the idea — and eventually the goal of Powermat — is that one day the cell phone companies will embed the company’s wireless charging tech right into the phone itself, making wireless charging a whole lot more simple.

Boston-Power, which once dreamed of building a lithium-ion cell battery factory in the United States, announced Tuesday it has lined up $125 million of investments to shift a big part of its business to China and thin its operation in the U.S. by about 35 percent.

Only 72 percent of China’s wind-power sources are connected to its grid — meaning there’s a good deal of wind turbines that are spinning that aren’t providing usable clean power. Battery maker A123 Systems hopes its first deal in China can help with that problem.

The market for electric vehicles is moving more slowly than expected. That’s why companies like Johnson Controls are focusing more heavily on “start-stop” vehicle technology, which is a system that automatically cuts off the engine of a gas-powered vehicle while it’s idling.

The next-generation of lithium ion batteries aren’t just here to power the first wave of electric cars, they’ll be providing better energy storage for gadgets and computers, too. Leyden Energy is launching a lithium-ion battery for laptops that won’t degrade for at least three years.

Utilities know they have to figure out how to store energy produced intermittently, such as wind and solar, or store energy from fossil-fuel power plants to keep the grid loaded when wind turbines and solar energy equipment aren’t doing their best.

And the DOE loan guarantee train keeps on chugging. This morning the DOE says it has offered its 14th loan guarantee — a $17.1 million conditional commitment to AES to build a 20 MW energy storage system using A123System’s (s AONE) lithium ion batteries.

Turning battery breakthroughs into a sustainable business means requires a team to find the “killer application” for their particular technology, and figure out who’s willing to pay for it, says Maurice Gunderson, a senior partner for CMEA Capital’s Energy and Materials group.

Boston-Power has raised $60 million in fifth-round financing — cash that the startup hopes will fuel a rapid expansion of its capacity to build energy storage devices for plug-in cars and the electric utilities.

Who can you expect to be very aggressive about going after the lithium reserves found in Afghanistan? China’s electric vehicle players. China is swiftly becoming an electric vehicle powerhouse, recently surpassing the U.S. as the world’s largest automobile industry.

Coda Automotive, the startup that aims to build electric cars in China for the U.S. market, has just announced the close of a whopping $58 million Series C round of financing to help launch its first vehicle — the Coda Sedan — in California later this year.

Aptera Motors, the developer of three-wheeled hybrid and electric vehicles, says it has raised new funds from NRG Energy and needs to raise a whole lot more from the federal government as well as private markets.

Chrysler and NASA plan to share data and research related to battery systems, energy storage, materials engineering, radar, robotics and other technologies over the next three years as part of a new alliance announced this morning.

In the weeks since restrictions lifted on insiders holding the bulk of A123’s stock, some executives have started to cash out. The transactions represent just a trickle of cash compared to the wealth created on paper in the first day of trading.

Chinese automaker Geely, which is known for its low-cost compacts, plans to buy the loss-making luxury brand Volvo for $1.8 billion from Ford Motor (s F). How does the deal play into China’s larger role in the nascent electric vehicle market?

Ever since World of Warcraft started showing signs of cancer-like growth — ravenously consuming massively multiplayer online game subscribers — video game industry entrepreneurs and investors have hunted for a WoW killer, the next big game capable of toppling the 11.5 million subscribers developer Blizzard has amassed worldwide. They need to stop looking.

Google today said on its official blog that it has developed optical character recognition technology to the point that its search engine can read any scanned document in Adobe’s PDF format, effectively turning scanned images into words that are searchable and indexable.

Battery maker TonenGeneral Sekiyu K.K., a Japanese subsidiary of Exxon Mobil, has started construction of a $325 million battery plant in South Korea which will make the critical separator film needed to maker lithium-ion batteries. The plant will sell the film to battery maker LG Chem.